After finally tackling the 1963 Oscar fiasco, Ryan Murphy set his sights on another scandalous chapter of Joan Crawford’s career with Sunday’s Feud episode, “Hagsploitation.” In it, Hedda Hopper (played by Judy Davis) arrives at Crawford’s estate to alert the fading star (played by Jessica Lange) that movie columnist Louella Parsons is circling a story about a “stag film” in which Crawford is said to have starred early in her career—when she was still Lucille LeSueur. Although Crawford shrugs the story off as fiction to Hopper, she is clearly haunted by this alleged episode from her past. Soon after, Crawford visits her brother Hal—who, in Murphy’s retelling, is the person shopping the blue movie, Velvet Lips, to offer him a check in exchange for silence.

So what of those long-rumored Joan Crawford stag films—The Casting Couch and The Plumber, among the other alleged titles—reportedly made early in the actress’s career, when she was trying to scratch together enough money to make it to Hollywood? Well, it depends on whom you ask. No physical copy of the purported films—all reportedly made before 1925—ever surfaced in print or, in more recent years, on the Web. In Hollywood’s studio-era heyday, though, companies like MGM and Warner Bros. were so keen to protect their celebrity investments that they employed fixers—see: Hail, Caesar!—to make precisely these kind of P.R.-damaging stories go away. Without the concrete evidence, though, we will just have to depend on those close to the story—and everyone, from Crawford’s spouses to those alleging the mob was involved in the cover-up, has talked.

Crawford’s first husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., confirmed the existence of at least one of these risqué pictures—telling Crawford biographer Charlotte Chandler that Crawford told him about the film before she became famous, before they married, and before the blackmail threats started rolling in.

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“Billie was absolutely terrified that I would find out about a film she had made when she was in a financially desperate moment,” Fairbanks said, using his nickname for Crawford, according to Not the Girl Next Door. “When she told me about it, as we began to be very involved, she said, ‘I have to tell you in case it makes a difference.”

But Fairbanks Jr. never actually saw the so-called film, and had a difficult time getting any information about it from the woman who would become his wife.

“I tried to get as many details from her as possible, especially as to what she wore or didn’t wear in the film, and specifically what she did in the film, but I only got tears,” said Fairbanks Jr., revealing that those were his kryptonite. “I’ve always found a woman’s
tears a powerful weapon. I could more easily face a duel in a film or a real-life naval battle in World War II.”

Fairbanks Jr. also told Chandler that he eventually spoke to one of the blackmailers, grabbing the phone from Crawford on one occasion and offering his own threat—telling the man on the other end of the call that, if he called again, “it would be thrash instead of cash.”

“She was never bothered again,” Fairbanks Jr. claimed—a point Crawford refuted in her own 1962 memoir A Portrait of Joan, where she described a blackmail threat received on a honeymoon with another husband, Franchot Tone.

“On our wedding night I received an anonymous phone call,” Crawford wrote. “I’d received such calls before and had been afraid to tell anyone. Two men said they had in their possession a stag reel in which I danced. They wanted to sell it to me.”

Crawford, however, adamantly denied that she took part in any such project.

“I had made no such movie,” the actress wrote, revealing that she simply forwarded the blackmailer to Louis B. Mayer and the studio’s “legal wizard” J. Robert Rubin. Crawford confirmed that the blackmailer did send his film in, but MGM denied the woman in the picture was Crawford.

“Mr. Rubin viewed the film and assured the men that ‘If that’s Joan Crawford, I’m Greta Garbo,’ ” Crawford wrote. “The threats of blackmail which had followed me for so long, ended the minute Mr. Rubin saw that film.”

Crawford’s version of the story was G-rated, but several other books paint a far more complex picture of how MGM may have squashed the stag-party rumor. Authors David Bret (Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr), Tim Adler (Hollywood and the Mob) and Fred Lawrence Guiles (Joan Crawford: The Last Word) all reference Crawford’s F.B.I. file, which is said to have confirmed, according to Guiles, that “a film of Crawford in compromising positions was circulated . . . to be used at smokers.” (“Smokers” were parties for men.)

In Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr, author David Bret alleges that the F.B.I. file also stated “that as much as $100,000 may have been handed over to this unknown blackmailer at around this time—and that MGM had made a previous payoff, almost certainly to the same man, who some believed to have been Joan’s brother, Hal.”

Several biographers have described how Hal moved to Hollywood to try to make it like his movie-star sister, and Crawford initially helped him by getting him a few extra gigs. Hal did not share his sister’s hardworking genes, though, and eventually ended up manning a motel night desk and regularly pressuring his sister for money.

“The payoff must have been settled with a stern warning, if not an actual death threat to the perpetrator,” wrote Bret, “for though several Crawford ‘stag films’ are known to still be lurking around in private collections, Joan never had to deal with the matter again.”

Author Tim Adler takes the story even further—alleging that, in a juicy plot twist, MGM called upon mobster Johnny Rosselli to negotiate with the blackmailers. In his book Hollywood and the Mob, Adler writes:

The blackmailers wanted $100,000 to hand over the
negative, but the studio would go no higher than $25,000. Hays asked
[Johnny] Rosselli if he could broker a deal. The gangster met the
extortionists and explained who he was and for whom he worked. He also
made it clear that unless they handed over the negative he would have
them all murdered. The blackmailers relinquished the negative and
Rosselli pocketed the $25,000.

Adler also pointed to other alleged evidence that would prove the existence of a stag film—among it: that Crawford paid MGM a mysterious sum of money in 1943 when she was “released from her contract, despite her departure having been mutually agreed upon”—a possible payback for the hush money. Also, Adler wrote, in “January 1974, MGM’s former head of security, Howard Strickling, told erstwhile colleague Samuel Marx that the studio had to buy up pornographic movies starring Crawford.”

Another Crawford biography still, Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography by Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell, refused to buy the stag-party story—instead alleging that Crawford’s brother Hal was responsible for starting and stirring “the untrue rumor” that Crawford appeared in pornographic films after the actress cut him off financially.

“When the checks stopped coming, both [Crawford’s] mother and brother would threaten to sell nasty ‘inside’ stories about Joan to newspapers,” wrote Quirk and Schoell. “Hal was particularly notorious for the deals he tried to make with many different (generally appalled) writers.”

Crawford may have maintained, publicly at least, that she never appeared in a stag film. But she was more than happy to confirm all reports that her brother Hal was a good-for-nothing so-and-so.

“Hal was a louse, an out-and-out bastard,” Crawford added in a different interview. “He could charm the skin off a snake, but nothing, not his jobs, not the men and women in his life, lasted long. . . . Liquor, then drugs, and always his distorted ego, took over. I supported that son-of-a-bitch until the day he died.”

Indeed, even though she considered Hal a leech and “a monster,” she really did keep in touch with him until he died in 1963 (not 1964, as Feud shows) from a ruptured appendix—sending him telegrams in the hospital. And before Crawford left town for New York, the L.A. Times reported that “a woman who identified herself as Jean Rogers, his sister-in-law,” visited Hal in the L.A. hospital one last time—though “he had no sister-in-law.”

After the L.A. Times realized that Hal had indeed died, the paper published a belated story on his death, writing, cruelly but accurately, “He was the brother of actress Joan Crawford—his life and career overshadowed in death as it had been in life.”

In retrospect, perhaps what Crawford resented most in her blood relative—aside from that his reported blackmail history—was that she did what she had to do to become a success—be it lie (in both senses of the word), cheat, and steal. But her brother couldn’t be bothered to even attempt making it on his own, even after she had painstakingly paved the path to Hollywood for him.

Crawford would later recall her improbable ascent from a dirt-poor family in San Antonio, Texas, to becoming the most-famous woman in the world. In a statement that might be the closest this world gets to an answer about the long-running stag party rumor, Crawford said, according to Shaun Considine’s Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud, “I had no brains. I failed in school and college. My options for survival were few.”